Electronic Music Midwest to make sounds, beautiful to 'granulated and anxious' at the Dalton Center

Mike McFerron, Electronic Music Midwest founder and composer, is among 21 composers to be at the Electronic Music Midwest Mini-Festival.Courtesy photo

KALAMAZOO, MI-- The piano was once new, too.

"At one point, there wasn't a piano, and then people made a piano," composer and Western Michigan University's assistant professor of music composition Christopher Biggs said.

For a few hundred years composers made music specifically for, and inspired by, the piano. At the Electronic Music Midwest Mini-Festival, 21 composers and performers will make music specifically for, and inspired by, computers. It will be at the Dalton Center March 17, part of WMU's New Sounds Festival, March 14-April 5.

"Now we're using computers to develop all different types of instruments that do different types of things, and that's where musical development is. We're using computers to enhance, to modify and to create new types of sounds," Biggs said.

The Mini-Fest is divided into three concerts, where one will hear "everything from pretty textural washes, to a piece for glockenspiel and live electronics by a composer from Wisconsin, Jeff Herriott, which is very beautiful. And then you get things more granulated and anxious, aggressive," Biggs said.

This is an off-shoot of the Electronic Music Midwest Festival, formed and based in Kansas City, Mo., in 2000. The Mini-Fest has brought electronic compositions to various Midwest universities since 2010.

Biggs, who earned his masters at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, is bringing the Mini-Fest to WMU for the first time.

This is his second year in Kalamazoo. He found that with electronic music, "compared to a lot of places, Western had been a bit behind in terms of the technology that they were using ... But with the students, there's a lot of interest, because it's part of our world today."

EMM festival founder and director Mike McFerron wrote in an email, "We'll be bringing a LOT of equipment to Kalamazoo," including an audio system to put 5.1 surround sound in Dalton.

Plus, "there will be a lot of computers," Biggs said with a laugh.

It's not all strictly electronic. McFerron, composer-in-residence at Lewis University in Romeoville, Ill., with performer Andrew Spencer, will do McFerron's "Clave Piece," where the sounds of the simple wooden percussion instrument are manipulated electronically. In another piece Michael Pounds of Ball State will use a combination of saxophone and motion-tracking sensors that allow the body to become an instrument.

There used to be a sharp division between composers for acoustic instruments and electronic in the academic world, Biggs said. "That's increasingly breaking down, in part because it's so much easier now to get familiar with the technology, and it's almost a part of the skillset that you're going to get one way or another."